In the interests of transparency about the often obscure academic process, I’m going to post the draft of my scholarship statement here; I’ve just sent it to my chair for his feedback, so it may well be drastically revised before it actually goes out. 
It’s supposed to cover my work from 2015 to today.
It’s interesting, trying to figure out what the common threads are among the various things me and my ADHD brain work on!
(Random selfie of me with my Blaze garage roses (which are having a GLORIOUS time). After swimming: tired, happy, and a bit bedraggled.)
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Mohanraj Scholarship and Creative Work Statement
In France, they refer to futurists as ‘perspectivists,’ and often that role is filled by history professors. This is how I’d frame my own work – offering perspective on the human experience along multiple axes, and attempting to create positive social change thereby.
One angle of vision is time-bounded – looking towards the future, and also back through history. Another is more a question of scope – considering the deeply intimate domestic sphere (the labor of cooking, keeping house, providing care, enduring illness) and connecting that to broader societal concerns (economic structures, nationalism and border issues, political engagement, quiet revolutions). As the saying goes, the personal is political.
On the futurist front, I’ve published short stories in the foremost speculative fiction magazines (Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, etc.), and have a book-length novel-in-stories (Jump Space) accepted by Constellation Press & Riverdale Avenue Press, scheduled for Spring 2024. A recording of my story, “Plea,” was exhibited at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, and I was delighted to travel to Pakistan to teach at the inaugural Salam Award speculative literature workshop in March 2023. I also direct the Speculative Literature Foundation, and as part of that work, have been producing a podcast, Mohanraj and Rosenbaum are Humans, now in its second season, which focuses primarily on creative writing and editing, but also delves into parenting, local politics, international perspectives, and more. (https://speculativeliterature.org/mrah/)
While I serve on the boards of multiple futurist and speculative fiction organizations, asking what better futures might look like (working on projects such as the XPrize’s “Future of Housing Lab” in Boston, and the Musuem of Science and Industry’s “Department of Next Strategic Task Force”), at least as much of my time is spent looking back in time, primarily through the lens of historical and immigrant foodways.
I turn to food as a way to bring my students and readers deeper into culture, to see the effects of colonization (British, Portuguese, and Dutch) on Sri Lanka’s culinary and social history. I’ve spent the last three years immersed in food writing – essays, memoirs, and more, delving deep into research that helped me write the first major Sri Lankan American cookbook, A Feast of Serendib. “Mohanraj does a superb job of combining easily sourced ingredients with clear, instructive guidance and menu recommendations for all manner of events…a terrific survey of an overlooked cuisine.” (Publisher’s Weekly starred review)
I followed that 2020 publication with Vegan Serendib in 2022 (which Food Network named one of the top ten vegan cookbooks for that year.) Three of the poems I wrote for those cookbooks were exhibited January-June 2023 at the South Asia Institute in Chicago, and I’ve spoken at several libraries on Sri Lankan food history.
I’m currently writing a series of essays using food to explore diasporic politics and post-colonial concerns, and have received a 2021 Illinois Arts Council Grant to support that work. My husband is white American, for enough generations that he’s not sure exactly where all his ancestors came from. Once, when Kevin and I were talking about naming our first child, he asked whether we wouldn’t be better off if we didn’t cling so hard to ethnic, racial, nationalist traditions. Divisions. In some ways, I think he’s right. Sri Lanka was riven by ethnic conflict for decades, and we are still dealing with the aftermath — surely, it would be worth giving up much, if you could thereby make the conflicts end. Can we choose the good parts of our culture to cherish, and leave the darker aspects behind? Food writing offers a way in to exploring those questions.
On the domestic front, in addition to food literature, much of my recent focus has been on illness; in the wake of my cancer diagnosis in 2014, I wrote and published Perennial, an experimental book that combined gardening and romance with the poetry I wrote during treatment. My cancer memoir, Tornado, which was originally published as a series of blog posts online, is being published in June 2023. I’m particularly interested in direct public engagement through blogs, podcasts, etc. – interestingly, my blog, started in December 1995, is apparently the third oldest on the internet, according to the Online Diary History Project. One might consider it a massive creative nonfiction project…
In all of my work, I try to consider marginalized voices and perspectives, bringing them into the broader conversation, as we work together to shape a better world.
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